Livejournal users’ discontent with SUP’s activity has reached it peak: on March 21st the Day of Silence is planned to be held, i.e. no posts and commentaries will be written. SUP’s decision to stop registering new accounts with no advertising provides further impetus for discontent. It is the English-language users, who have proposed to boycott, but not the Russian-language subscribers, who are traditionally criticizing SUP’s website.

The subscribers to a popular online blog service Livejournal call on everybody to participate in the Day of Silence on March 21st. The strikers intend not to create any content in LJ, i.e. write neither comments nor posts, from Friday midnight to Saturday midnight GMT (that is 3 a.m. Moscow time). The strikers require the Russian company SUP, which is Livejournal’s owner, to recall its decision made last week to stop registering new basic accounts (such accounts are free of charge and they contain no advertising), to officially inform about the changes made to the service and to hold preliminary discussions with the Livejournal’s Supervisory Board. It should be noted that SUP has not officially announced its decision to stop registering basic accounts. As soon as the given decision became public, it has been heavily criticized by two of four members of the Supervisory board, i.e. Danah Boyd and Livejournal’s founder Brad Fitzpatrick.

The SUP Company owned by the businessman Alexander Mamut seized control over Livejournal Russian segment in autumn 2006. In a year the company acquired the right for the whole service. Over the given time the Russian language users of the service filed a lot of claims both political and technical against the company. However, under the current circumstances it is not the Russian language users, who have shown discontent with SUP’s activity. Beckyzooly user from US initiated the strike having published a corresponding appeal in the English community No_lj_ads. ‘We would like to show solidarity of Livejournal users, as we consider the basic account owners as valuable providers of content and friends’, - says Beckyzoole.

Always available up until this point has been another account level, the Basic Account. This featured up to six userpics, a small choice of styles and designs, lower functionality and less access to some bells and whistles, but overall it was a good, simple free blog. And most importantly, there were no ads.

After the acquisition of Livejournal by SixApart, another account level was added, the Plus Account, which had some of the bonuses of a Paid account (more userpics, text messaging, more styles available), but with the added presence of ads all over one's journal.